THE -1 NEW YOKKljÎ It " '-.. '" - :: ,",'Çi , :: II' · "1 11\' . I , _ :: ::: t' _ ; . -.Þ - tp It .. rm. 1\\\\, o , ' 0 0 -- . .. 0 . )\ . . 'II'. THE, TALI( OF THE TOWN Notes and Comment A PORTLAND newspaper recently recorded the angered dismay of the people of Kennebunk, Maine, who rose the other morning to find that the town's centennial plot-a remnant of the original village green- had been "removed by state-highway crews to make way for new traffic islands." Outrage provoked an inquiry, which established that the removal was PUI suant to a state-highway project that had been approved not very long before by the town's citizens them- selves. The centennial plot had been Kennebunk's most important and visible link with its past, having been enjoyed and admired by more than five gen- erations. For the last half century, It had been maintained by a special trust fund, and in recent years a varicolored c -A-;--- -- -- 1. \ (( V _ " l!:;:): p. - ' II " ., <' . 3 _ ?"o; ........... display of flowers there had been con- tinually renewed by a town museum under the terms of the nostalgic bequest of the late Colonel Harry A. Mapes. The centennial plot was gone before anyone even noticed. However, the paper reported, a decision by the town selectmen to request "grassed-over islands rather than the hard-topped type" was expected to "ease the situ- ation-if the grass plots are approved by the State Highway Commission,' Let us hope it does. vVho destroyed the centennial plot? Not the highway crew. They only fol- lowed instructions; why, most of them weren't even from Kennebunk Not the voters of Kennebunk. They merely approved a recommendation for new lights to control the obviously con- gested traffic on its way to other parts of Maine. The engineering plans were on file in the engineer's office at the Capitol in Augusta, about eighty miles away, but they did not appear on any ballot. Nor could many voters have un- derstood them if they had appeared. In any event, the subsequent protest clearly proves that the citizens would have re- jected the design if they had been aware of its details. Not the State Highway Commission. It was, after all, the Com- mission's assigned task to draw up plans for improving the highway system in a manner that, according to studies, would benefit the entire area. Having submitted recommendations, it there- after acted as the faithful agent of the expressed popular will. Moreover, since the particular engineer involved was from halfway across the state, he could hardly have been expected to know of the passion and nostalgia attached to that one plot of grass, so like a thousand others on his surveys. The construction of the highway had originally been stim- ulated and assisted by federal funds flowing froln the vast and visionary Federal-Aid Highway Program. With- out these funds it would never have been built. \Vas it, then, the federal govern- ment that destroyed Kennebunk's cen- tennial plot? It seems unduly harsh to blame a bureaucracy that perhaps had never even heard of Kennebunk, and whose program, moreover, was a self- evidently necessary response to the enor- mous boom in automotive transporta- tion. (Statistics reveal that the entire American population can fit into the front seats of its automobiles If it wants to.) Perhaps we are now getting closer. There would have been no highway program without all the cars, and thus-so radical theory predicates-the villains must be General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler. However, the managers of those companies would immediately counter any such accusation by point- ing out that they build cars only be- cause people want to buy them-that they simply act as the admittedly well- paid economic servants of a free people makIng a free choice. The argument IS unanswerable Yet common sense tells us that the millions of people who, year after year, proud and apprehensive, drove their new acquisitions from a dealer's lot didn't want to destroy the cen tennial plOL Clearly, they didn't mean to. Had a poll been taken and the issue explained, a majority of them would probably have supported preser- vation. Yet when they put their signa- ture on a bill of sale, they helped initiate a chain of events that ultimately evoked the futile anger of a Maine town. That chain of events is what is meant by "the system." It was, finally, the system that forever erased the fine old Kenne- bunk centennial plot Exile W HEN the colonels' coup of April 21, 1 967, put an end to Greek democracy, Helen Vlachos, alone among the newspaper proprietors of Athens, chose to suspend publication rather than submit to military censor- ship. The colonels found that irritating, since Mrs. Vlachos' newspapers, the morning K athimerini and its breezier afternoon cousin the M essimvrini, had been the leading voices of conservatism and what Mrs. Vlachos calls "respect- ability" in the country. She continued to irritate the colonels by giving inter- views to foreign journaÌists, and final- ly, after an intervIew in which she de- scnbed one member of the j un ta, Brigadier General Stylianos Pattakos, as "a clown" and remarked that she was more afraid of her dentist than of an- other member, Colonel George Papa- dopoulos, she was placed under house arrest. Two months later, she dyed her